tl;dr

When it’s good it’s fantastic, unfortunately, it’s not always good.

opening remarks

The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath is another novel John Self praised last year, and given I just gave his previous recommendation five stars on Goodreads I’m probably on a good thing picking-up it up.  Actually, I’m surprised I haven’t read McGrath before this, I own Asylum and Spider but, as is often the case with me, just never got around to reading them.

knee-jerk observations

The actor Charlie Grice has died and “that good society, the men and women of the London theatre” have come together for the funeral.  It’s only as they head to the wake that Joan Grice, the titular wardrobe mistress, hears her dead husband’s voice:

A despondent summary of 1946:

Joan believes that her dead husband has been resurrected to a degree, in Daniel Francis’ performance of Malvolio, her husband’s signature role.  It’s all a little creepy:

Oh yes, I like that – “carapace of grief”.

The novel is written in an omniscient third person where the narrator moves casually through the minds of the characters – sometimes in a single paragraph – and also addresses the reader.  It’s subtle enough, not too meta or self-aware, but I’m a quarter of the way through the book and I’m waiting for the story to move into next gear.  Now that the relationship between Joan and the young actor Frank, who she believes possesses the soul of her dead husband, is generating sexual tension hopefully the plot will heat up:

And there’s that next gear clunking into place.  The revelation that ‘Gricey’ was a closet fascist, an anti-semite, is all the more disturbing because Joan, and by extension her and Gricey’s daughter Vera, are Jewish.

McGrath brilliantly depicts Joan’s fury at his betrayal:

Frank’s mother, Rosza, describes the family’s harrowing escape from Nazi Germany:

The love… or more precisely boy toy… triangle between Frank, Joan and Joan’s daughter Vera is doing very little for me.  More interesting is Joan’s infiltration, with the help of Vera’s husband Julius, her husband’s Nazi cell.

The novel doesn’t do enough with the idea of Gricey’s ghost haunting Joan.  But this scene, where she confronts her husband’s dybbuk, entering his closet, calling out his name, terrified by what feels like fingers touching her body, the horrible, chilling experience topped off by an anti-semitic slur, is fantastic.

Joan enter’s the Nazi-den, right there in the heart of old London town:

The book is set in 1947, but McGrath could be describing the alt-right.  The only thing lacking is the tiki-torches:

The Gist Of It

There were times when I was utterly engrossed in Patrick McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress, and there were times when the story struggled to maintain my interest.

This constant shift from “I love this” to “how many pages are left in the chapter” can mostly be blamed on the muddy nature of the narrative.  Is this a story about the death of an actor and the subsequent embodiment of his soul in the body of a younger thespian?  Or is it about our dead actor’s secret past as a blackshirt, a British Nazi?  Alternatively, should we be focussed on the love triangle between mother, daughter and Frank the young, possible possessed actor?  To be fair to McGrath, he does twine these story threads together.  The problem is that they are not all equally interesting.

Joan’s deep love for her husband Charles – the actor who has passed away – and the shattering revelation that he was a Nazi sympathiser, a blackshirt, is the highlight of the novel.  There’s the crushing betrayal, Joan is Jewish, the fact that everyone else seemed to know his secret and Joan’s descent into Charles’ world which brings with it the recognition that he wasn’t on the fringe of the fascist movement but front and centre.  It’s brilliant, shocking, gripping stuff.

Less successful is Joan and her daughter Vera’s relationship with the young actor Frank, a Jewish emigre from Germany who escaped the camps.  Vera doesn’t know her mother previously had a fling with Frank which generates a tepid sort of drama. Vera is also cheating on her husband, Julius, who has been spending his time infiltrating the blackshirts.  His subplot is infinitely more interesting than his wife’s infidelity, and it’s a shame we don’t get more of it.  Also in the mix is the ‘supernatural’ element.  As has now become de rigueur, there’s the question as to whether the ghost of Nazi Charles exists or whether Joan has gone a tad doolally.  She first thinks he’s possessing Frank – which is why she falls for the young man – but once it’s revealed that Charles was an anti-semite she decides he’s haunting his old wardrobe.  At times it is genuinely creepy, but as a plot point, it drifts in and out of the novel as Joan becomes more involved with Mosley’s gang of British fascists.

When it’s good, The Wardrobe Mistress is fucking fantastic, but when it drifts from Charles Grice, his Nazi past and Joan’s struggle to come to terms with this truth, it’s a less compelling novel.